It has been my distinct honour and pleasure to witness multiple groups and school classes writing science operas. The enthusiasm, the level of creativity, the model building, and the performances of these operas have been beautiful and helped inform students, teachers, and my scientific view of the world. I am convinced that science opera writing will find a larger and larger home amongst science and arts educators, and indeed be a place where the modern issues of science and art can be played out on a grand stage, with the splendour and ceremony of a grand opera.
And indeed, society itself faces many existential crises, including climate change, over-population, fair distribution and sharing of resources. Such issues deserve the stage and the splendour of opera. Science operas can give voice to these concerns.
One of the factors in science operas’ favour, is that I find that enabling students to frame and perform their learning helps them learn better than they do with traditional methods, and starts their minds on a personal and collective journey engaged in ways to improve the world.
Since its invention 400 years ago, opera has metamorphosed through several stages, with evolution of characters and stories found in Greek drama to the classical period, where characters and plots were increasingly related to real life. This change must almost certainly be related to the other changes in civilisation.
Now, I feel that a new stage of opera is justified, based on humanity’s much clearer, more detailed, and explicit understanding of science and the universe. Science and technology have revolutionised all of human life and endeavours, so it is really appropriate to further humanise opera with tales, stories, and explications of scientific endeavour that reach across scientific disciplines, characters, periods, and themes. All are logical plot and source material for science operas.
One might wonder why science operas have not been performed or attempted as a system before now. Thinking about the global developments which build upon the science operas described in this book, one speculation would be that, in fact, The Two Cultures as C.P. Snow described them, are an artefact of pre-Global Science Opera society.1 In Snow’s own words: “So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their Neolithic ancestors would have had” (1998, pp. 14–15). Science operas are a sturdy and strong bridge between Snow’s cultures.
The people of the world must learn more science and math if we are to prevent the earth from dying. This is a huge problem in the United States. As of this writing, some world leaders are able to ignore the overwhelming body of evidence that humans are causing climate change. And this ignorance might lead to the death of our planet. It is also easily proven that most Americans need to get better at simple math. Work by Eric Gaze indicates that more than 80% of Americans are illiterate in pre-algebra (proportions, ratios, linear equations), thereby limiting their ability to read graphs, or understand data.
The science writer Timothy Ferris (2010) has traced the development of democracy as due to the proliferation of science and scientific methods. “The democratic revolution was sparked – caused is perhaps not too strong a word – by the scientific revolution, and that science continues to empower political freedom today” (p. 2).
Similarly, science now has the depth and profound understanding of so many important parts of the universe and the earth, perhaps it can begin to unleash a revolution in operas – operas that model, explain, celebrate, hold in wonder, and generally share the heroic view of the universe that we now possess.
As I am a part-science educator, we know from cognitive science that students making models of scientific phenomena is one of the most effective teaching strategies known. Hence, students making models, in the form of creating a science opera, is almost certainly an effective mode of science teaching. Science is often felt to be beautiful and heroic by scientists – we scientists need to be engaged in a process where science can become heroic and beautiful for all people, and science operas are a great way to do this!
So, in conclusion, it is time for opera to catch up with our modern world, and allow the proliferation of powerful science and education through the composition, staging, and performance of science operas. Global Science Operas are true pathfinders for the world at large, and I feel privileged to play a modest supporting role in the chorus.
Note
Global Science Opera, www.globalscienceopera.com
References
Ferris, T. (2010). The science of liberty: Democracy, reason, and the laws of nature. New York, NY: Harper Collins.
Snow, C. P. (1998). The two cultures. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.